Traffic across a data-center network may be characterized in terms of traffic flows. A traffic flow may be thought of as a series of interrelated frames, or packets, sent from a common source computer in the data-center network to a common destination in the data-center network. Traffic flows may come in many different sizes. Typically, most traffic flows are short in duration and/or bursty. Such short traffic flows are often referred to, because of the relatively small times and/or amounts of information being transferred by these traffic flows, as “mice flows” Other traffic flows, however, may transfer larger amounts of information, potentially over longer periods of time. On account of the relatively large amounts of time involved and/or the relatively large amounts of information being transferred during these relatively large traffic flows, these large traffic flows are often referred to as “elephant flows.”
The presence of these differing types of traffic flows in a common data-center network may have implications for the performance of the data-center network. Although elephant flows are typically more rare than mice flows, typically, the majority of the packets being transferred in a data-center network pertain to elephant flows. The presence of such elephant flows across a substantially fixed path in the data-center network for a relatively long amount of time, may, for example, cause congestion in the data-center network.